You’d think his genes would have better prepared Christopher Buckley for hard times.
On Friday, the son of conservative icon William F. Buckley, endorsed Barack Obama for president. Why? I’m not sure, really, and judging by Buckley’s rambling, unfunny endorsement in The Daily Beast, neither is he.
Buckley doesn’t care for Sarah Palin, that’s for sure. He seems vaguely anti-religious, which would gravely wound his parents' hearts–but they probably knew already. He seems far more concerned with personality than with freedom which he hints at wilfully surrendering in exchange for good times.
But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves.
Deep thought, huh?
From a Buckley, as unfair as this expectation may be, we expect intellectual brilliance illuminating the dark recesses of their profound decisions. In this self-examination lies the profundity of radical choices; otherwise, they are simply knee-jerk responses like a water bug reacting to the kitchen light.
What Buckley willingly ignores is that Obama has shown few tendencies toward “traditional left-politics.” That was Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. The Democrat party of 2008 rejected such.
Obama embodies not American-left, but Eastern Europe-left politics. He is a Trotskyist, not a McGovernite. Obama believes in an intellectually pure form of Marxism, and, like Lenin, he will happily use Stalinist murder and repression to achieve it. Says Michael Barone:
Obama supporters who found the campuses congenial and Obama himself, who has chosen to live all his adult life in university communities, seem to find it entirely natural to suppress speech that they don’t like and seem utterly oblivious to claims that this violates the letter and spirit of the First Amendment. In this campaign, we have seen the coming of the Obama thugocracy, suppressing free speech, and we may see its flourishing in the four or eight years ahead.
Someday in the in near future, should Obama win, Chistopher Buckley, having seen the waste laid to his beloved America, will seek to publish a mea culpa for having helped the ascendency of the man who restored the spoils of the Cold War to the other side. By that time, though, such speech as Buckley’s may well be grounds for re-education.
Be careful what you wish for, Chris. And when deciding whether to back a radical politician, read the books he’s read, not the ones he’s written.
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